Scranton

Scranton is a city in Pennsylvania and the county seat of Lackawanna County. In 1778, Isaac Tripp built his home in the area, becoming the first European settler; more settlers from Connecticut arrived to settle in the area. During the 1840s, the Scranton brothers moved into the area and began producing rails for railroads, and they built a railroad northward in 1851, using Irish immigrants as labor. On 14 February 1856, the borough of Scranton was incorporated, and it grew from a small, agrarian-based village of New Englanders to a multicultural, industrial-based city populated by Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, southern Germany, and Poland, many of whom joined the Democratic Party. The population grew from 35,000 in 1866 (when Scranton became a city) to 150,000 in 1878, and it became the seat of the new Lackawanna County. In 1880, electric lights were introduced at the Dickson Locomotive Works, and, in 1886, the first electricity-powered streetcars began operating in the city. A local Baptist minister conferred upon Scranton its present nickname, the "Electric City". After World War II, coal production and rail traffic declined rapidly, causing a loss of jobs during the 1950s. The Susquehanna River's flooding of the Knox Mine in January 1959 virtually ended the mining industry in northeastern Pennsylvania, and many storefronts and theaters became vacant during the 1970s and 1980s. Since the mid-1980s, the city underwent revitalization. In 2016, Scranton had a population of 77,291 people.